South Africa Unemployment Anger Turns on Foreign Shop Owners

(DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA) – Foreign shop owners in South Africa are choosing to stay and rebuild despite a wave of anti-immigrant protests that saw businesses looted and calls for mass deportations, with many saying they have no homes or livelihoods to return to.

Ethiopian refugee Helana Wolde locked his home and watched on television as thousands of angry demonstrators marched through South Africa this week demanding that foreigners leave.

His wife and their three South African born children were terrified, he said from his shop in downtown Durban where he sells coffee and lentils. Wolde left Ethiopia 21 years ago to escape political persecution. He does not see going back as an option. “I have no place, no property, no family” in Ethiopia, he said, adding that his brothers there had been jailed.

While thousands of immigrants packed up and left South Africa ahead of the 30 June protests, many more feel their best option is to stay, even as the country has turned hostile.

Wolde reopened his shop, which unlike others was not looted, the morning after the protest and was hoping for the best. Although the nationwide marches on Tuesday were largely peaceful, there were several pockets of attacks on foreigners and looting of migrant owned businesses. “We’re all extra scared,” Wolde said.

South Africa hosts over 167,000 refugees and asylum seekers, according to the United Nations, a small number compared to many African countries. Uganda has 1.8 million, according to the UN refugee agency, Chad has 1.2 million, and Kenya has 850,000. The overall immigrant population in South Africa stands at about 3 million, or 4 percent of the total, low by global standards.

The main group behind the protests, March and March, says it only objects to illegal immigration and is not xenophobic. But the vigilantes it has stirred up often target foreigners indiscriminately, and their frequent demands that immigrants show their documents are themselves illegal, as the government has pointed out in several statements, since only police have the authority to ask for them.

Several South African protesters said that what really bothered them was seeing foreign owned shops on their streets while they were struggling to make a living. “This economy belongs to our people and it has been hijacked,” the group’s leader, Jacinta Ngobese, a former radio presenter, said in a speech on Tuesday. She has called for marches every Thursday until its demands, including mass deportation, are met.

A third of South Africans are unemployed and frustration with overstretched public services and rampant crime has boiled over, although researchers say that immigration is not to blame for these problems.

“Foreigners are not taking jobs from South Africans. We are starting some small jobs here in South Africa. We are paying rent,” said Daniel Abide, 33, whose small convenience store in Clermont, a township near Durban, was looted on Tuesday night. “If you want to open a shop, you must open a shop like us,” he said.

Abide came from Ethiopia a decade ago and has two shops, one of which was not targeted. He hopes to eventually reopen the other one, which was broken into and emptied out by looters. He employs one South African in his small business.

Other shops that were looted in Clermont were run by people from Somalia and Pakistan, locals told Reuters. Outside one, men were working to fix the broken doors before nightfall, when they were afraid looters might return.

Wolde keeps a laminated stack of documents, including his refugee certificate, tax and bank statements, on hand to show anyone who questions his legal status. Sometimes he has to show them two or three times a day to police or other people who come into his shop, which is on a bustling street with mostly Ethiopian businesses.

“Now business is no good,” Wolde said. “Everybody is scared to come here.” He has soured on South Africa. But having already survived a shooting in 2008, and xenophobic looting in 2015 and 2021, he plans to stick it out anyway. “I make business here. I don’t know why they’re angry.”